artist statement

I am not a whore in the traditional sense. I want to give everything for free. I want to give everything. I want to give it to you, even if you do not want it. I need to give this to you,Now. Because it matters.

My work is silent but loud. I want to gently strip away your skin and touch you underneath. I want to insert a needle, or maybe a thorn from a flower.How do you feel? Please tell me. These dances come to existence from a need to speak, to ask, to participate. The form that they take is the form that offers itself for me to find a way in. I am looking for a way in, into your mind, your body. The work is created in our meeting. It does not exist without you.I make work to understand the world around me, to make sense of what may have none. I dance to map what otherwise is incomprehensible to me. I am attempting to see the world through a poetics of the body, which is to feel and to be felt.My work asks what is important. What do we care about? What were the choices that brought us here? They are questions I ask of myself, and I try to lie less every time I answer. I go towards discomfort, because it is a mobilizing force. I place naïveté above cynicism: it does not make me look good but it helps me see what is here. I move in a guise of confusion, of embarrassment and not knowing, because the constant reminder of how little I understand forces me to actually learn.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Conceptual Framework

I am working on a poetics of pain. Being in a country at war, remembering the physical sensations of fear and threat that I connected to the Cold War, and to sensations and memories from my childhood. How does a constant sense of alarm affect the body? There is an invisible undercurrent of threat and insecurity, which legitimizes violent actions in the long run, but nothing is visible; it is in the air, transparent yet always present. How do we stand to look at other people in pain? The imagery of terror is a male imagery, but there are so many women and everybody knows what happens to them, yet it is still invisible. How do we make choices to distance ourselves or to become involved in their suffering? We tell so many stories. There is mud, and sand, and hair. There is the beauty of breathing, of the moment when the eyes that have been beaten and swollen closed have finally healed enough to crack open, to let a sliver of light in.